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I'm at a conference for housing associations in Wales today and tomorrow, where we hope to encourage Board members to see the benefits of social media in learning from each other, cutting down on meetings, and connecting with the residents that they serve.
We've just started a conference blog, and as an experiment in social networking I wondered if you would drop by with a greeting and maybe a tip or two about how organisations and their committees can start to use social media. Just a comment ... or a piece on your blog if really moved ... I want to show how blogs can connect!

Here's a piece I've just shot with development manager Sioned Hughes ... do across to the conference blog here and say hello

Just what to call yourself if you are organising to do good stuff for social benefit is quite confusing these days ... but at least we know what challenges and opportunities lie ahead thanks to a summary from NCVO Third Sector Foresight. Pestilence, famine and war are there in various guises, but so too are the potentially positive uses of technology, and different ways of organising. More on those later.
First to what doing good should be called. The other day Stuart Etherington, the chief executive of NCVO, the umbrella organisation for UK nonprofits, was musing about a change of name for what is currently known as the voluntary and community sector. These organisations may also be known as the third sector (as in not public or private). Some are charities (about the only term widely recognised by those not in the business), and the more entrepreneurial are social enterprises. It can be difficult to spot the difference between charities that have an entrepeneurial trading arm, and socially responsible businesses that may have an associated charity.
Charity Finance reported:

NCVO chief executive Stuart Etherington has ambitions to augment the power of the voluntary sector voice by harnessing the whole of civil society, not just charities and social enterprises.
In an interview with Charity News Alert, Etherington outlined his future agenda for the organisation and the sector – “I would hope they are parallel” – and signalled his desire to boost the sector’s influence over public policy by widening its net to include all of civil society and by establishing a 50-member civil society assembly.
Etherington refused to be drawn on whether he could foresee a day when the NCVO would rename itself the ‘National Council of Civil Society Organisations’, but confirmed the organisation was “keen to encourage a debate about how the sector defines itself”.
“I prefer the term civil society because it is more inclusive and defines us in relation to those we work with and for, rather than to government or business.”
He also admitted to seeing merit in recasting the Office of the Third Sector as the Office for Civil Society, an idea first proposed by the Conservatives as long ago as 2001.
An early indication of the new agenda has emerged in the name of the 2008 Almanac – the NCVO’s annual study of the state of the third sector. Instead of ‘Voluntary Sector Almanac’, this year’s edition is to be renamed the ‘Civil Society Almanac’, and will for the first time include data from organisations such as trade unions, universities, housing associations and political parties.
The NCVO also plans to establish a 50-member assembly that will debate civil society’s response to pressing public policy issues. The assembly will mostly comprise representatives from within the voluntary sector, nominated and then elected by NCVO members, but provision has been made for ten of the 50 to be co-opted.

I believe that the idea of an assembly is a response to NCVO-member pressure more involvement in policy and direction, and I'll be interested in how it turns out. It's a fairly old-style mechanism of representation which might lead to the usual problems of uncertain governance, where people aren't sure whether the assembly, forum, council or whatever it may be called is the focus, or the board of trustees. Maybe it will be OK if Stuart and NCVO staff see their organisation as a network which is permeable rather than closely-bounded, and encourage continual conversations between members, staff, assembly-members and others as well as having some formal meetings.
As I mentioned above, the challenges and opportunities facing whatever we may be called have been highlighted by the foresight unit at NCVO. Megan Griffith reports on a seminar at the NCVO annual conference where a panel of speakers debated the ‘burning issues’ of climate change, bridging communities and the ways in which young people are associating.The session began with a presentation from Lenka Setkova, who took everyone through the findings of the Carnegie UK Trust’s Inquiry into the future of civil society in the UK and Ireland. You can download the report here. It is a terrific piece of work, but unfortunately only available, a far as I can see, as pdfs, which rather stifles online conversation because it is difficult to link or quote.
All the more useful then that Stuart Etherington invited seminar participants to discuss the presentation, and then assemble their own set of messages as risks/challenges/threats, opportunities, questions, and calls to action. You can see the whole list here, but here's the interesting calls to action:

Civil society should define and exemplify new models and patterns of growth. Growth is not always good. Extra extra extra is neither equitable or sustainable – let’s look for ‘infragrowth’. The negawatt (energy saved) rather than megawatt (energy generated).

If we could make growing older a positive experience we would at the same time find universal solutions for social coherence.

I'm glad to see a potentially positive role for technology and the online world in there, and I'm look forward to exploring that further with Megan and colleagues, who I've worked with before. I'm also taking some comfort from Stuart's renaming process that this blog's title may have increasing relevance. It was all a bit of an accident, as you can see here.
Previously

Earlier this week John Craig and colleagues, who are developing the Third Sector Innovation Exchange, invited a bunch of us along to share ideas over wine and pizza on what it takes to make collaborations work. I ended up pondering on how "thingies" might help - of which more later.
The Innovation Exchange is being funded by the UK Government to "find new ways to connect innovators in the third sector with public service commissioners and other investors and help them to work together to develop their work".
What this means, as I understand it, is that the exchange wants to find social entrepreneurs, nonprofits and others with good ideas, and then support them in working with public bodies who might buy their products and services, and funders who could invest. At the same time they have to encourage organisations who may be conventional in procurement to be more adventurous. The first two areas of activity are supporting independent living and excluded young people.

The evening was a great opportunity to wish John and his team every success in a challenging task, pitch in some ideas and identify some challenges. We talked a lot around the need to mix together the processes of encouraging innovation with specific activities to find and support innovators. In order to do this the team are meeting a lot of people, developing a more sophisticated online system, and planning some events - just as a start.

I had plenty of questions - but thought other people's might be even more interesting, so I asked my friend Tim Davies to pick up my camera and do a little interviewing. He and John were happy to oblige. The change in colour balance is due to a flare up in the stove rather than any heat in the exchange.

I came away thinking that one thing John and colleagues might do, to aid their work and that of anyone else trying to promote innovation for social good, is to set up a "collaboration thingy exchange". This would be a space where we could all pitch in those "something or others" that if you do them, both help make things happen and create some ripples.
Offering people wine and pizza for the evening is definitely a well-tried thingy, because it gets you into conversational rather than document-writing mode, you strike up some new relationships, and get the feel of who you could work with. If you follow-up with blog items, calls or emails you find who is responsive. It's best to do these meet-ups regularly, and it doesn't require a fixed venue. For example, Jeremy Gould has followed up UKGovwebBarcamp with meetings in the House of Fraser coffee shop across the road from his Ministry office. Lloyd Davis has established the Social Media Tuttle Club each Friday in the Coach and Horses, Soho.
Larger-scale things on the same lines are Open Space events, Barcamps, Unconferences - all face-to-face spaces where people are encouraged to think creatively, strike up conversations, form and reform groups to take ideas forward.
Online spaces can - with more difficulty - fulfill a similar function. Simon and I opened up a multi-author blog system to develop, in the open, our failed bid for the Innovation Exchange. The new Innovation Exchange will have a much fancier system.
You can add more spice to events by designing them as games, as my colleague Drew Mackie and I have done over here. One idea I suggested to John was to run some simulations where innovators and purchasers "changed sides" so they understood each other rather better.
What doesn't succeed, in my experience, is expecting these tools to work without some facilitation. Are people thingies? If so, what's needed both online and face-to-face are collaboration co-ordinators, as Shawn Callahan calls them. The role of these co-ordinators - or whatever you may choose to call them - is:

ferreting out good collaboration practices and tools and keeping up-to-date with the field

finding situations in the organisation where better collaboration would make a difference to the quality of products and services, the speed of delivering these products and services to clients, and the ability to use a diversity of ideas and approaches to innovate

helping people learn and adopt collaboration practices and tools

collecting stories of how collaboration really works for the times you need to justify the role

connecting people and ideas so new collaborations might flourish

The blog where Shawn and colleagues talk about the work of their company in Australia is itself a terrific innovation and collaboration exchange - with generous sharing of the methods they use, as well as insights gathered from elsewhere....
... which brings me to the best thingy of all, which is to open up. I'm sure John and colleagues feel under some pressure to "deliver" ... when of course success depends pretty much on the actions and attitudes of others (and as Dave Pollard confirms, attitude is hugely important). What's needed, in my view, is a whole lot of processes and activities that encourage innovators, investors and public bodies to co-design the improved services that we needed ... which reminds me of another set of thingies prepared by Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff as a manifesto for co-creation.
Anyway, my best suggestion to John is to share the challenge that the Innovation Exchange faces by inventing it in public, as Simon is doing with Ruralnetonline. Keep offering the wine and pizza, and blog as you go.
After the evening I asked John for any further thoughts. He replied:

The evening was fantastically helpful for me, if challenging, so many thanks to those who attended. If I were to pick out two features of the conversation, they would be diversity and scale.
On diversity, there were some strong challenges about how the Innovation Exchange can reach different people across the system. The chasm between the people who buy services and those who use them means getting citizens' views is vitally important. Equally, different kinds of people in different roles will respond to the Innovation Exchange in different ways, and we need to cater for all of them.
On scale, there was an important question about whether we want to be encouraging the third sector to be 'innovative' or to be supporting particular innovations to grow. The conversations encouraged me to be loud and proud about the fact that we are focusing on the latter - not preaching at people about innovation but providing practical support for innovators who need it.
I hope people will continue to engage with us and challenge us.

Thanks to the Our Kingdom for noting that Justice Minister Michael Wills has now confirmed in a recent speech there will be a programme of events and online discussions leading up to a Citizens Summit about a proposed British Statement of Values later this year. This is one of three strands to implement the Green Paper Governance of Britain proposals I wrote about here.
The speech is interesting both for the details it give of this process, and asides on the balance of representative and participatory democracy.
After speaking about the Constitutional Renewal Bill - which will "surrender or limit a wide range of powers currently exercised by the executive, transferring them to Parliament" and the British Bill of Rights and Duties, Michael Wills said:

The final strand of the programme is the formulation of a British Statement of Values. Our national identity matters. Most advanced democracies have developed ways to express formally their view of who they are as a nation. This country has throughout much of its history vigorously discussed what it meant to be British. It was only in the years after the Second World War that we went through a period of introspection, lacking in self-confidence when such discussions were often regarded with embarrassment. We are now far more successful and self-confident as a country and the government believes the time is right to find a way to express who we believe ourselves to be in a way that is inclusive and commands broad support.
If we don't do this, others will. National identity matters to people. If there isn't a national process to discuss it, in ways that are inclusive of everyone on these islands, then there is a risk that this territory will be colonised by sectarian and sometimes even poisonous views.
For us, here the process of discussion and deliberation is as important as the outcome. That's why we are doing this through an innovative constitutional process. Shortly, we will start a series of discussions up and down the country, accompanied by print material and online forums, on what it means to be British, what's best about it, what best expresses what's best about it. This will all be fed into a citizens summit - a representative sample of perhaps 500 people, selected randomly, for example, from the electoral register, but filtered, in much the same ways as opinion polls filter their samples, to ensure it is demographically representative. And informed by these consultations and by presentations directly to them, they will deliberate - and we hope decide - on four main questions: should there be such a statement of values, if so what it should be, how it should be expressed and finally what it should be used for.
Their decision will then go to Parliament for a final decision.

Writing at Our Kingdom, Guy Aitchison highlights the Minister's caution about the benefits of edemocracy:

Wills discusses the transformational role of the web, but with a mixture of enthusiasm and apprehension. He celebrates the ease with which constituents can now contact their MP, but is uneasy that new forms of technology and communication might challenge the representative principles upon which our democracy is based. “The electronic plebiscite”, he warns, “is just a click or two away” and we should be “very careful about embarking on a slippery slope towards plebiscitary democracy.” He imagines what might happen if an unscrupulous billionaire wanted a policy change and set about a nationwide campaign of mass emails and advertising to convince voters to support it online. Could MPs be trusted in such a situation to meet Burke’s ideal of the representative, using their “unbiassed opinion, mature judgement and enlightened conscience’”?
Wills’s misgivings, I’d suggest, reflect a much broader anxiety on the part of government towards the power of the web - something memorably brought home to them last year with the huge success of the anti-road charge e-petition. For government, the challenge is to use new technologies for deliberation and engagement between elections, whilst ensuring that, what has been called, the “mainframe” remains intact. Is this possible given that the mainframe belongs to a previous age?

However, Michael Wills does end with a general commitment to great engagement with citizens, saying:

In these circumstances of the changing societal base for our democracy and the advent of new technologies which, indeed can be a benign force enhancing democracy, this government is convinced that we need to work more vigorously to re-engage citizens in the representative democracy we all share - and from which we all benefit.
Hence the surrendering or limiting of the power of the executive, the development of new mechanisms to make policy development a collaborative venture between government and citizens, instead of a top-down exercise which can only be accepted or rejected at elections with no in-between options, and giving citizens greater opportunity directly to monitor and scrutinise the delivery of policy.

It's comforting to know that when the Ministry does start to roll out online discussion it has some in-house expertise.
Declaration: I did done some early work for MoJ with Drew Mackie, running a workshop with staff to help design the programme. We used a game like this to simulate the process, and I think it helped wok through how the mix of online and events might work.

Here's a story about how the BBC is developing new local multi-media services, its Charter remit for "sustaining citizenship and civil society", the closure of BBC Action network, development of citizen (or networked) journalism, and how the BBC Trust consults us on what the BBC is for. These developments and issues may be related ... I don't know .... but I think we should be told. But by whom? Maybe on the BBC Internet blog where they are exploring Digital Democracy.
My interest in these issues was re-awakened by a couple of e-mails in the UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange. E-democracy guru Steven Clift asked whether anyone has an update on the BBC Action Network, which has been hailed as a civic media success story, but as I had noted earlier is due to close soon. Steven wondered if future developments related to a Press Gazette story about Regional newspapers’ fury at BBC local web plan.

Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication and Co-Director, Centre for Digital Citizenship, responded:

The BBC is dropping/has dropped the Action Network. It plans to do a number of other exciting things along these lines in the coming months. The Action network (previously iCan) was always meant to be an experiment. The BBC is right to learn from experiments and change course if that's what seems right.

I'm interested on the e-democracy and civil society front, but also also because, with colleagues, I did some work last year for the BBC Trust when it was carrying out a review of BBC online services, and exploring how blow blogging could assist in its consultation. Here's my review of developments over the past year, which I've referenced in some detail in the hope that others closer to the action may pick up the threads.

The year-old BBC Charter sets out as a key public purpose for the Corporation "sustaining citizenship and civil society", but until recently it hasn't been clear how that might be fulfilled. There have been speeches by senior figures but no practical details. At the same time there has been a lot of discussion about the changing role of journalists, audiences and citizen content-contributors in a more networked world. See references below on both.

Then a couple of weeks back Controller of BBC English Regions Andy Griffee told students at Coventry University about a planned £20 million BBC Local website, which "features a map with direct links to content such as articles, radio and video for each region". The Coventry site Through the Looking Glass reported:

Topics covered with this new site will be news, sport, travel, and weather, bringing each element down to a local level. Commenting on the service, Griffee said that it will be available “anytime, any place, anywhere”, and later confirmed that regular exclusive news bulletins will also become a major part of it. While the service hasn’t been properly decided on by the BBC Trust yet, the reaction amongst the audience was largely positive.

The other speaker was Alan Kirby, Editor of The Coventry Telegraph, who described how they were planning their own web site with ultra-local sites divided by post codes. The focus of these sites will be user-created content that is relevant to more local people.

Griffee, sensing that Kirby was a little disturbed by the BBC’s plans, offered some words of reassurance, stating that the service is not designed to “compete with newspapers”, and later broke it down to the fact there are only 5 radio stations but there is 66 newspapers in the West Midlands.

Then, says the report, visitors both went on to explain that nearly all of their journalists are being trained in more skills, highlighting the importance of online as a catalyst for obtaining larger audience coverage.
However, the response from regional newspaper representatives, quoted by the Press Gazette, and picked up by Steven Clift, was less restrained. In Regional newspapers' fury at BBC local web plan the Gazette reported that while previous plans for ultra-local TV were dropped in October, this was a new "unprecedented attack". Ian Davies, development director of regional media business Archant, added:

The new websites will have hyper-local capabilities using geo tagging of content and mapping interfaces. What the BBC gives with one hand, it takes away with a huge skip on the other.
What a strange approach to public service media. Look at what the community-leading local press is doing in reinventing itself to provide local content and ‘connectivity’ beyond print; then take a huge publicly funded stick and swing hard to cause as much damage as possible to this vital organ of local comment and democracy.
This is not competition. This is BBC, full-bodied, unfair, damaging to existing emerging services, competition. It seems that attempted demolition is the sincerest form of flattery.

As Sir Michael put it in a speech last month, the BBC is being "challenged to play its part in reinforcing social cohesion in an increasingly diverse society". He went on to give his personal commitment to that objective in these terms: "All of my previous work has convinced me that diversity both within and between local communities is a source of strength rather than weakness - and that the UK will become stronger the more it recognises and builds on that diversity. The BBC can and should help with this."
Whether you agree with those sentiments is neither here nor there. Who precisely is Sir Michael, not to say all those hundreds of faceless programme producers, writers and editors, to decide that the UK will become stronger if it embraces diversity? Who elected them?
Sir Michael's account of the BBC's mission is explicitly, tendentiously and presumptuously political. Whether licence fee payers believe that their country will become stronger "the more it recognises and builds on" diversity is a matter between them and their mandated government. It is entirely inappropriate for the BBC to enforce a particular systematic view of how society should develop and how, as Sir Michael himself notes, its rapidly changing structure should be addressed.
Engaging in a clash of overtly political objectives is properly the business of political parties or opposing lobby groups, not a supposedly neutral, publicly subsidised broadcaster.

I hope you'll see from all this that the BBC Charter public service remit for "Sustaining citizenship and civil society" - and how it is fulfilled - is potentially relevant to all aspects of democracy, local and national. It could also influence the way that journalists, bloggers and anyone aiming to publish content of public interest is able to do so, and get a wide audience.
The BBC Trust, who act on our behalf, don't currently provide us with anywhere to discuss these issues, except through rather formal consultation processes ... which aren't online. I believe they are considering doing more following earlier explorations with bloggers. Meanwhile the BBC managers and journalists, through a widening range of blogs, including The Editors and BBC Internet, are engaging directly with the rest of us ... but are understandably tentative in dealing with policy issues.
I think that the plans for local news sites, trailed by Andy Griffee, provide a great opportunity for the BBC and BBC Trust to engage with license payers on just what "sustaining citizenship and civil society" really means. But who will help convene that engagement? I wonder if Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA, might be tempted. He gave a cracking keynote at the 2006 e-edemocracy conference, and is following through strongly in promoting RSA Networks for civic innovation.
Anyway, I'll be interested to see whether my modest attempt here at agenda-setting-by-blogging raises any interest. I'll have to email a few of those quoted ... because the problem with this citizen journalism stuff is few people know you are doing it. Of course, that may change.

Networked journalism: For the people and with the people: Charlie Beckett in the Press Gazette says the idea of the professional journalist and amateur working to create a new kind of news is the future.... Networked journalism is where the people formerly known as the audience contribute to the whole editorial process. The public write blogs, take pictures, gather information and comment as part of newsgathering and publishing. The professional journalists become filters, connectors, facilitators and editors. Oct 18 2007.

The pro-am approach to news gathering. Jeff Jarvis: As news organisations inexorably shrink along with their audiences, revenue and staffs, I believe that one way for journalism itself to expand is through collaboration with the communities it covers. Oct 22 2007

What the BBC is for. Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, Royal Television Society Fleming Memorial Lecture. The BBC has to develop better ways of covering the issues that resonate with those of its audiences who do not necessarily see the traditional institutions as fully reflecting and representing their concerns. Nov 1 2008
What's the role of trustees now we are networked? How the new BBC Internet blog give us a direct connection with those developing BBC services, and issues this raises about the role of BBC trustees. This blog, Nov 11 2007.

BBC should not decide how society develops. Janet Day, Telegraph.co.uk. Dec 17 2007.
BBC News: The Editors. Mark Thompson, Director General: We want to take our coverage of Westminster, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the Northern Ireland Assembly, the European Parliament, as well as local councils up and down the land and turn them into the most engaging, the most creative multimedia portal for democracy in the world, using BBC Parliament and our other television, networks, radio, the web and mobile. Direct access to information about your MP or representative: how they vote, what they stand for, how you can contact them. Survival guides and in-depth analysis of current debates and current legislation. Easy ways, for anyone who wants to, to plug into and take part in the debate. And all of it available to every secondary school in the UK as part of a strengthened commitment by BBC Learning to supporting citizenship and modern media literacy.
We don’t want to do all this on our own, but in partnership with some of the existing sites which are pioneering web democracy – and with the democratic institutions themselves. Parliament and its sister institutions already have powerful forms of scrutiny and accountability that, to be honest, very few people outside their walls know anything about. We want to work with them to change that. Jan 15 2008.
Regional newspapers' fury at BBC local web plan: Press Gazette: The BBC has prompted a new rift with the regional press by planning a network of 60 ultra-local websites. Jan 28 2008

BBC Internet blog - Digital Democracy: Pete Clifton: The BBC's public purpose around informed citizenship means it must play a vital role in this area. We already offer more day-to-day coverage of our institutions than anybody else, but a dynamic portal that brings together the best of what we have in audio, video and text, the best that others are doing, something that is easy to find, searchable, personalisable and sharable, feels like a fantastic goal. Feb 11 2008

There's a wonderful, cautionary, example over on the ideal government blog about why you should be very wary of letting a PR person use your name informally online. It involves William Heath, who as chairman of Kable Ltd, is pretty well known in UK public sector technology; attendance at the recent UKGovwebBarcamp; and ICELE, funded by Government to promote eDemocracy, citizen empowerment and the like. ICELE are rather keen to promote a big conference in a couple of weeks time. William writes:

Do I know Fraser Henderson?

Someone called Susie Ruston from something called 21cConsultancy sends me a personal invitation to some citizen empowerment symposium

"My colleague Fraser Henderson mentioned he recently met you at a BarCamp event at Googles offices and that you were interested in receiving more information about the next International eParticipation and Local Democracy Symposium blah blah blah Citizen engagement is a key priority to the UK Government as demonstrated by the launch of the CLG ‘Action Plan for Community Empowerment’....Secretary of State, Rt Hon Hazel Blears....Governments position...Action Plan...Symposium....etc etc etc"

Well, it ain’t that personal. I’ve never heard of Fraser Henderson. He certainly didnt meet me at the Google offices because I wasn’t at BarCamp. And who in their right mind goes about expressing interest in eParticipation Symposia? Not me. So this is either a misunderstanding or a fib. I expect everyone who put their email address to the Barcamp thing is getting Susie’s PR sweet talk. What a drag. I wonder if this 21c outfit is Romanian?

There then follow several comments on the lines of |"I got one of those and wasn't at Barcamp either" concluding with another from William (or admin, which I presume is him)

Dear Susie

I don’t know you so I didnt open your attachment. Nor do I know Fraser Henderson so either he misled you or you’re taking his name in vain. Nor was I at Barcamp. And I never expressed any interest in e-participation symposia.

So what’s happened here? Where did you get my email address from, also those of my friends Jeremy and Sam?

Also, what is 21cconsultancy? The only record I can find is something in egovmonitor which says 21cConsultancy is a “professional firm”

Well, I was at Barcamp, and do know Fraser, centre manager for ICELE, who has always been perfectly charming, and who did say he hoped to see me at the symposium. But you won't find much Googling Fraser, which may explain William's puzzlement.
I can't make it to the symposium because I'll be at the Circuit Rider Conference running a workshop with Laura Whitehead and Nick Booth. I hope it will, anyway, be a bit more empowering than the symposium agenda, which looks heavy with plenaries and panels aimed at people in government. Quite the reverse of Barcamp.
Anyway, event preferences aside, it seems to me that the lesson here is, if you are in the online business, but choose not to have a profile online, it's a big mistake to delegate online presence to a PR person. Or maybe there was just some misunderstanding. Either way I think Fraser and Susie should hurry over to William's place and explain. Currently William's piece is the top Google hit for Fraser Henderson ... which isn't good PR. Let's all link there:-)

UpdateFraser and William have now connected via comments on William's blog, and look set for a friendly meetup. Second lesson: with a cheery wave, these things can turn out well. Hope I haven't been too humourless here ... but there is something important about being yourself online (even in emails) buried in this.

My friends over at ruralnet|online are making tremendous progress in their quest to re-invent their business in the open. As I reported the other day, they face the challenge of moving from a "walled garden" set of online services which they charged for, towards a more distributed system using a mix of tools to provide people engaged in social enterprises and nonprofits with information, communication and collaboration systems.
The challenge - as many commercial online providers have found - is that these days people are getting smart at searching for their own information, setting up blogs, wikis and other tools, using Flickr, YouTube and so ... all for free. They often learn the tools at home (or their children do). Why pay when they get to work, particularly if work is in a charity or small voluntary group? There's lots of issues, of course, about training, support etc for those less confident - but even the technophobes have figured you don't pay much for information and tools these days.

The key issue is finding the additional value you can offer users. How do you find out what they want? Ask them to help you redesign the business. Chief Executive Simon Berry and a team led by Paul Henderson are doing that on a multi-user blog site and and through events including a focus group which I helped run last week.

As I reported on the site, we played through a co-design game in which groups invented two scenarios (a small village fighting for sustainability, and a large network of parish and town councils), then used a set of cards representing tools and activities to develop an action plan. Some of the cards offered high-value ruralnet|online services.
It went rather well ... except the groups didn't choose the ruralnet|online cards until well down their development plan. Oh dear - end of business? Absolutely not. Paul has come back with a set of ideas about how ruralnet|online can add some value to free tools, give some away, charge for some, and also offer personalised services. So far they aren't even looking at additional ads.
One of the key principles is, if the good stuff is happening elsewhere, don't try and compete, send people across and do some remixing. On that basis, I won't go on about this any more but suggest you pop across to my|ruralnet - first shot at what ruralnet|online might be and add to Paul's rich mix.
By the way, it won't be only rural - important though these services are for hard-pressed, often isolated, communities. There'll be Networksonline services for the rest of us urbanites.

Paul Miller, Dan McQuillan and Christian Albert have given us first news of their plans for Social Innovation Camp in London, when ideas people, geeks, mentors and sponsors will gather for a weekend of intensive co-creation on April 4-6:

Innovation happens when diverse groups of people get together - individuals who can bring something different to the mix and help each other to look at problems in a new light.
We’re interested in creating unexpected collaborations between people, organizations and networks. The Social Innovation Camp will be an opportunity for all participants to meet people who think about things differently to them.
The weekend will be designed with this principle in mind. Social Innovation Camp will bring some of the best of the UK’s web designers and developers together with those at the sharp end of social problems. Throw in some people with the business and organisational knowledge needed to make things happen and we’re hoping to come out with some innovative solutions to enable social change.

Ideas for your innovative project have to be in by March 7, and you are told by March 17 whether you are successful. These projects are then developed collaboratively over the weekend:

Pitch your prototype. We’re hoping that by the end of the weekend you’ll be part of a group with a basic working model for a new venture. The event will close with a pitching process which will include some prizes for the winning pitches.
Start your venture. Social Innovation Camp is all about creating the relationships needed to start new projects and we hope your ideas won’t end with the weekend. We’re currently thinking about the best way to help you pursue your venture – or if it’s more appropriate, find someone to take it on for you. More on how this will work coming soon.

I think we are now seeing several different approaches emerging on how nonprofit organisations may use social technology (building on old structures) ... or how we can collaborate to do good stuff using new stuff (which is likely to mean developing new structures).
These different - maybe complementary - approaches were evident last year at the Newman Arms get together which I reported here. Some people were interested in enhancing the capability of existing community and voluntary sector organisations, others felt a new direction was needed. Dan McQillan - of the social innovation camp team - made it clear he felt charities are broken and later trailed the innovation camp idea.
Meanwhile there's still a lot to do helping existing organisation deal with the basics of computer and internet use. I'll be hearing more about that when I run a workshop with Laura Whitehead, Nick Booth and others at the UK Circuits Riders conference at the end of this month. Circuit Riders provide tech support to small organisations.
Earlier this week I went to a new Forum for Circuit Riders in London organised by London Champion Miles Maier. Unfortunately I couldn't stay for the whole session, but from the interesting stories of what life is like on the front line I got confirmation that there is a big stretch between the visions emerging from Web 2.0 social innovators, and groups still struggling to network their office computers. Are they left to struggle on their own as funding for technical support from Circuit Riders becomes more problematic - as seems likely? Should they just budget tech costs in with phones, print, rent and other overheads - and concentrate on convincing funders of the need for this in core costs? Should Circuit Riders pitch some innovative ideas to social innovation camp? Maybe time for a Newman Arms session.

In this he ponders whether the growth of internet-based communications means our traditional ways of organising for social good will change dramatically.
Michael's argument is that nonprofit organisations are in large part set up to fit in with past and current ways of raising funds, meeting government regulations, employing people, organising volunteers. We then end up with a hierarchical system of trustees and staff. Organisations also reflect past communication needs - but these are changing:

Relationships within organizations, between organizations, with constituents, the media, funders, policy makers, and others all have distinct patterns of communication that shape the structures of organizations and civil society.
Throughout the world, these patterns of communication are changing. Whether because of the plummeting costs of communication in the developed world or the historical leapfrogging of modes of communication in the developing world, more and more people who wish to communicate with each other, are doing so.
Some existing communication patterns, however local or small scale they may be, genuinely reflect people's motivations and are thus scaling up as barriers to communication are lowered. In turn, they are displacing and destabilizing other patterns, particularly the hierarchical and insular ones that characterize the modern organization.
Is this the end of the organization? Probably not by name and certainly not in the broadest sense of the term. But the traditional, tightly controlled, top down, branded organization is finding itself having to adapt and change. The organizations of the future will not look like the organizations of today.

I would encourage you to read the whole article, and indeed subscribe to the Journal. You get a 300-page pdf for $18.95. Michael is mainly US-based, but the journal has a lengthy article by Geoff Mulgan and colleagues at the London-based Young Foundation, on "Social Innovation. What it is, why it matters, and how it can be accelerated". That's worth the price alone. I'm sure the ideas in the article will be further explored at Social Innovation Camp which Paul Miller and friends are running on April 6-8 at the Foundation.
I'm glad to say this is all very useful underpinning for the re-inventing membership project Simon Berry and I are developing with the RSA and NCVO Foresight team. That was inspired in part by an earlier article by Michael called The Permeable Organisation.
We'll shortly have a multi-user blog system up where anyone interested will be able to help us design the project.
I'm also encouraged by the way that blog comments suddenly pop up which serve to confirm a hunch. A year or so back I posted an item quoting an excellent piece by Lloyd Davis on how social media support the informal "shadow" side of organisations.
Now Philip Holden adds a comment:

I commented on Lloyd's blog because there is some well-established sociological theory that illuminates this.
I don't want to write an essay here (though I guess I should one day, at least on my blog...) so suffice to say that social structures (including companies and voluntary organisations) are just that; social structures.
Simply because they appear to be formal or self-evident doesn't give them any special ontological status. More importantly when they go unquestioned or even unnoticed it's a pretty good bet that they do so to someone's benefit.
Further, the power to recognise certain structures and to legitimise them rests with only some people (rich in certain forms of capital).
Dang! It's turning into an essay.
Can I put it simply? Well, the 'shadow' organisation (or society) has always been there (in Bangladesh as well as elsewhere) but only certain people have the authority to call it out of bounds.
Read Bourdieu!!

If we take notice of the informal as well as the formal, it's the blog comments as well as the journal articles that give us clues about what people are thinking and talking about around the globe.
So - which nonprofit organisations do you think will wither, and which will re-invent themselves?

This is the story of how you can move from a "build it and they (may not) come" approach to online places, to helping people create the places they really want to be on the Net. It involves re-inventing a business in public.
The other day I picked up an invitation to join the "Facebook for the cultural sector" issued by English Heritage, followed by one to UnLtdWorld, "a social networking platform that aims to empower and connect socially-minded individuals." This followed on news of MyCharityPage promoted as "Facebook for UK nonprofits". There was clearly a round of excitement among public agencies and funders a year or so back that is now leading to the roll-out of various places where, the promoters hope, we will gather and befriend each other, develop innovative projects, download resources, share services and so on. That's provided we aren't too busy on the real Facebook, on our blogs, or in a host of other online spaces.
It's not really fair to review the English Heritage Our Place, or UnltdWorld in detail yet, because they are still recruiting users and improving functions.
Still less My Charity Page.com, which says it "is an advanced social networking website with a unique combination of functionality for fundraisers and charities, maximising your fundraising potential at no cost to the charity or fundraiser". Ummm ... no it's not, it is a holding page where you can drop a comment. Maybe it will become a Change.org ... but not for a bit.
What interests me is that these sites still have the flavour of "build it and they will come", which didn't work a decade ago when new sites were more of a novelty. Just adding more functions won't attract experienced online users - because they are very critical and busy elsewhere - or the less experienced because weaning people off email and basic browsing is difficult if there isn't a compelling attraction. If there is a login to negotiate it is even more difficult.
These new sites may succeed if they have really good hosting and facilitation to build their community, linked to events and other activities. Maybe English Heritage and Unltd will be able to do that - if they have money in the budget to pay for the necessary staff. I-genius, which I didn't much care for when it launched, is still going with a fair strip of endorsing logos ... but then they have the attraction of a world summit for social entrepreneurs in Thailand in March.
If these sites do succeed, fine - provided they enable users to join up with what's happening elsewhere by bringing content in and out through feeds. As I argued in Do communities need boundaries? - drawing on Ed Mitchell's analysis of different types of online communities - it isn't helpful to build "walled gardens" on the Net while promoting the virtues of collaboration and innovation. I'm hugely encouraged by endorsement from knowledge management specialist Patrick Lambe who says that Enterprise 2.0 should be leaky.
There is another way, and my friends over at Ruralnetonline are demonstrating that you can both build your online offering with your users - rather than invite them in after the event - and also get away from the one-stop-shop approach aimed at a particular interest group.
For nearly 10 years Ruralnet has been running an online system linked to their work on rural community development and social enterprise. It has some core services, orginally run on FirstClass, with a facility to customise for different organisations or networks, but has been very much "come to our place". Over the past couple of years they have been experimenting with Web 2.0 tools, and moving some services across. Just before Christmas chief executive Simon Berry sought agreement from his colleagues to relaunch everything on their 10th anniversary in March.
What!!??? How do you do that and hope to get it right? Well, don't hope to get it right yourself - invite your customers in to help you re-invent your business. Make them co-creators instead of just "users".
Simon's colleague Paul Henderson is leading the way by creating a multi-user blog site where anyone can sign up and comment on proposals or add their own ideas for next generation services. (I declare a strong interest since I've know the Ruralnet team for 10 years, and I'll be running a face-to-face workshop next week to work through ideas with a focus group).
There are couple of factors that give Simon and his team confidence that they can do things this way. The first is that Ruralnet|UK is not just an online outfit: they do events, training, consultancy, and partnership projects which means they have strong relationships with lots of individuals, organisations and agencies . The second is that experience of the Open Innovation Exchange process we went through last year - creating a £1.2 million bid to Cabinet Office in public - revealed how energising openness can be. I've just done a short case study here on what we are calling our most successful failure of 2007. Successful because although we didn't win the bid, we got shortlisted and are convinced it is possible to do things differently.
As well as reinventing everything in public, the Ruralnetonline have shifted their business model from "come to our place" to one in which people can pick and mix which of their services they want. The forerunner of this has been an Experts Online widget that you'll find on sites campaigning to save post offices on the one hand, and also on one helping arts charities with governance issues.
I could go on ... but much better if you pop across to Ruralnetonline and let them know if your think it is possible a new online business this way. If you have something to add, I'm sure they'll aim to make their place your place too. Or the reverse ... it doesn't matter these days.
As I've written before (archived here), the RSA is also inventing a new online place for Fellows and collaborators, and on February 15 developers Saul Albert and Andy Gibson will be taking us through second stage development and discussion issues of how open or closed the system should be, among other things. They've done a great job in prototyping, and I think opinion is swinging towards open. The next challenge will be integrating the RSA Networks site into the main RSA site, and deciding what goes within the Fellows-only login. The question of how membership organisations deal with these tough issues will be explored in our re-inventing membership project. I hope some will be prepared to follow the leads offered by RSA and Ruralnet|UK and open-up to the people who know best what they need - their customers/users/members.